An increasingly large portion to textual content is disseminated to electronic viewing devices such as computers and mobile telephones. These viewing devices enable fast and low cost delivery of the electronic content via a network such as the Internet, mobile telephone networks, and so forth.
The electronic textual content is typically formatted by a viewing device prior to display to users. The viewing device may format text based on formatting instructions that are included with the electronic content. For example, hypertext markup language (HTML) code may be used to format (style) the content. In this way, a viewing device may display content as intended by an author or publisher.
Much of the content formatted by HTML (e.g., web pages) is relatively short in length (e.g., less than 1000 words) and may be stored using only a few hundred kilobytes of data storage. However, other pieces of electronic content (large documents) may require many megabytes of data storage such as books or other multi-page publications.
The formatting of large documents, particularly when using HTML, presents challenges that include load time performance, memory consumption, and formatting accuracy. These challenges may be of particular concern when a user navigates to a new user-selected location in the large document. In this situation, a browser (or other viewing software) typically reconstructs a viewable portion of the large document from the beginning to accurately identify and apply all formatting up to the user-selected location. This formatting process may be time consuming for large documents, may result in undesirable user perceived latency, and may require excessive amounts of device memory (e.g., RAM) which may impact performance of a device.